Emblasoft has acquired a majority stake in NetQPro, provider of the passive monitoring solution nScan, marking a significant expansion of its service assurance portfolio.

The acquisition adds passive monitoring to Emblasoft's existing capabilities in functional testing, performance testing, and active monitoring - giving telecom operators a single, integrated approach to assuring service quality across their networks.

Closing the visibility gap

Today’s telecom networks consist of a mix of different technologies, from legacy 2G and 3G, to 4G LTE, IMS, and 5G environments. Operators need to maintain service quality and customer experience while delivering new services and innovations. In this context, a single approach to service assurance method is no longer sufficient.

Operators need both visibility into real subscriber behaviour in the live network, and also the ability to proactively validate services using synthetic traffic.

This acquisition brings both together.

What nScan adds to the Emblasoft portfolio

nScan is a passive monitoring solution that collects, processes, and analyses live network traffic in real time. By extracting data from both the control plane and user plane, it gives operators deep visibility into how services behave across every generation of fixed and mobile networks.

Key capabilities include:

• 24/7 continuous monitoring, processing, and data analysis
• Support for fixed and mobile voice and data networks, from legacy SS7 to 5G SA
• Support for shared RAN environments, including MOCN and MORAN
• Predefined KPIs, aggregated across network and service dimensions
• Detailed radio problem analysis and network-wide call tracing with down-to-bit message decoding
• Real-time, on-demand subscriber-related signalling data tracing
• Advanced data analytics enabled by high-performance, column-based data storage
• An open architecture designed to evolve with operational needs

Stronger together

Passive and active monitoring address fundamentally different but  complementary needs.

Passive monitoring shows what is actually happening in the live network, based on real subscriber traffic and signalling behaviour. Because it observes every session, it can detect individual call failures that would not be visible in synthetic testing. 

In addition, it can identify trends like traffic growth or capacity constraints before they become service issues. When issues do occur, the rich traffic history makes it highly valuable for root cause analysis, giving operators the evidence needed to understand why an issue occurred, and how services behave over time. 

Active monitoring, meanwhile, builds on this by deploying software agents in the live network that mimic real users, generating synthetic traffic across any service or scenario to continuously validate service quality and identify issues before they impact subscribers. 

With today’s data volumes, particularly in 5G networks, comprehensive user plane analysis through passive monitoring can be cost-prohibitive. By combining passive monitoring for control plane visibility with active monitoring for user plane assurance, operators can achieve broader service assurance coverage at significantly lower cost.  

Together, they create a closed loop: passive monitoring detects anomalies in real traffic, active monitoring reproduces and isolates the failure with precision. 

Once a fix is applied, active monitoring can rerun the same scenario to confirm that the issue has been resolved - while passive monitoring continues to observe real subscriber traffic. 

The result is an approach to service assurance that is both reactive and proactive - giving operators full confidence across the entire service lifecycle. This closed loop between observation and validation also lays the groundwork for autonomous network operations — giving self-managing systems the continuous, verified intelligence they need. 

A more complete portfolio

With nScan, Emblasoft now combines passive monitoring, active monitoring, functional testing, and performance testing in a single, integrated portfolio - creating a broader offering for operators looking to simplify assurance workflows and to raise the bar on service quality.

“This acquisition is an important step towards a more complete service assurance offering," said Mikael Grill, CEO of Emblasoft. "By bringing passive and active monitoring together, Emblasoft becomes a stronger partner for service assurance for operators - combining real visibility into live network behaviour with the ability to proactively validate service quality."